Figures with Landscape - Bilbao Fine Arts Museum

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Figures with Landscape

Sánchez, Alberto

Toledo, 08/04/1895-Moscow, 12/10/1962

Gouache on paper

152 x 300 cm

c. 1960-1962

20th century. Third quarter

82/338

Acquired in 1972

The sculptor Alberto Sánchez Pérez is one of the fundamental figures in Spain's historical avant-garde. From a humble background, and lacking any academic training, he assimilated the languages of the international avant-gardes while making a living as a baker, and he then managed to link them to proposals with a geo-anthropological and social protest identity. The so-called "poetics of Vallecas", conceived along with Benjamín Palencia and Pancho Lasso, was his most original contribution, and he managed to get many of the leading figures in literature and art during the years of the Second Republic involved in it. After the Civil War, he went into exile in the Soviet Union, where he kept working as a stage designer and sculptor until his death.

Landscapes and figures are the most common fixtures in the iconology deployed by Sánchez Pérez in the two-dimensional works from his exile, just as they had been in his previous works. And they are precisely the terms that articulate the title of this work, which is unique because of its large size, something rather infrequent in his oeuvre. Just as in the majority of his sculptures and drawings, the figures are envisioned as the seed of monumental works because even when the large scale remained just a pipe-dream, to Sánchez Pérez it signified the vehicle of a poetic merger of art-nature-life.

Therefore, because of both its size and the thematic and formal repertoire that is used in this enormous gouache, it could be said that Figures with Landscape is a veritable paradigm of Sánchez Pérez's poetics.

The landscape depicted in this work is an ineluctable journey into memory, which identifies it as the primordial landscape of Vallecas. Thus, the hills scattered around the steppe, which could be in Russia, mark it like sacred landmarks, like the hill in Almodóvar de Vallecas where he founded his poetics on the eve of the Second Republic. The furrows and crops evoke an agricultural reality experienced first-hand in the lands of Toledo. The rivers flanked by parched vegetation spread across the plain, alternating with curves similar to those that pepper the Castilian steppe, the same as the bark-less trees like the ones Sánchez Pérez sketched with words in his writings. All of these elements compose a kind of feedback loop pointing back to his roots, yet they also become a proposal for the future.

In terms of the figures inserted into this gouache, they merely revisit a repertoire of plots scattered throughout his entire oeuvre. Thus, a bull, explicitly depicted in the foreground, is reconstructed in red geometrics when it is situated in the middle ground. The women, who are resolved with a relative degree of lifelikeness on the right, become abstract on the left until metamorphosing into trees, gypsy tents or island monuments wielding scarves over the symbolic stage of the landscape. Or in natural totems waving a red flag that emerges from a heart as an offertory. Or in a sinuous oval biomorph carrying a haybale while displaying gaps inside its cloak that allude to a face, a claw-hand, an enormous heart or the female sex open towards the horizon like a loophole.

In short, Figures with Landscape is a veritable epilogical summa, a kind of clamorous finale which, in the last stretch of a creative itinerary, recreates the aesthetic territory travelled throughout that entire journey, like the measures that close a symphony. [Jaime Brihuega]

Selected bibliography

  • Alberto, 1895-1962 [Cat. exp.]. Madrid, Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia, 1970. p. 20, n° cat. 81. (Con el título 'Figuras con paisaje al fondo')
  • Bengoechea, Javier de. Catálogo de arte moderno y contemporáneo del Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao. Bilbao, Banco de Vizcaya, 1980. p. 107. (Con el título Figuras con paisaje).
  • Alberto Sánchez, 1895-1962 : dibujos [Cat. exp.]. Bilbao, Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 1997. p. 150-151. (Con el título 'Figuras con paisaje')
  • De Picasso a Bacon : arte contemporáneo en las colecciones del Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao [Cat. exp.]. Segovia, Museo de Arte Contemporánea Esteban Vicente, 1999. pp. 104-105.
  • Entre la figuración y la abstracción : arte contemporáneo en las colecciones del Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao [Cat. exp.]. Pamplona, Museo de Navarra, 1999. pp. 78-79.
  • Madrid. pp. 223, 282. (Con el título Figuras con paisaje). N° cat. 67
  • Memoria rusa de España : Alberto y El Quijote de Kózintsev [Cat. exp.]. Madrid ; Toledo ; Córdoba, Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales ; Empresa Pública Don Quijote de La Mancha 2005 ; Fundación Provincial de Artes Plásticas Rafael Botí de Córdoba, 2005. pp.146-147, lám. 22.
  • Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao : guía. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2006. pp. 172-173.
  • Musée des Beaux Arts de Bilbao : guide. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2006. pp. 172-173.
  • Bilbao Fine Arts Museum : guide. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2006. pp. 172-173.
  • Taurus : del mito al ritual [Cat. exp.]. Bilbao, Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2010. p. 267, n° cat. 61.
  • Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao : guía. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2011. pp. 172-173, n° cat. 123b.
  • Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa : gida. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2012. pp. 172-173, n° cat. 123b.
  • Musée des Beaux Arts de Bilbao : guide. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2014. pp. 172-173.
  • Bilbao Fine Arts Museum : guide. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2014. pp. 172-173.
  • Brihuega, Jaime. "El fulgor de un epílogo : dos obras de la última etapa de Alberto = The glow of an epilogue : two works from Alberto's late period", Buletina = Boletín = Bulletin. 2015. pp. 165-192, 261-270.
  • 110 Años 110 Obras [Cat. exp.]. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2018. pp. 260-263, sin n° cat.
  • 110 Ans 110 Oeuvres [Cat. exp.]. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2018. pp. 260-263, sin n° cat.
  • 110 Urte 110 Artelan [Cat. exp.]. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2018. pp. 260-263, sin n° cat.
  • 110 Years 110 Works [Cat. exp.]. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2018. pp. 260-263, sin n° cat.
  • Bilboko Museoaren alfabetoa = El alfabeto del Museo de Bilbao = The alphabet of the Bilbao Museum = L'alphabet du Musée de Bilbao [Cat. exp.]. Bilbao, Bilboko Arte Ederren Museoa-Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao, 2018. pp. 288, 293, n° cat. 167.

Figures with Landscape